Posted on 02/22/2010 9:53:08 AM PST by FreeManDC
As a volunteer in my daughter’s kindergarten class, I was asked to help children write a “story” (a few words) to illustrate their pictures. Only one girl needed my writing help; only one boy could write for himself. Nearly all the boys seemed to be a full year behind nearly all the girls in their ability to pay attention, follow directions, control frustrations, sit still, handle a pencil or crayon and do what used to be considered first-grade work.
As reading and writing are pushed down to earlier ages, boys are struggling harder to meet higher expectations, writes Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today reporter, in Why Boys Fail.
“Each year since 1988 the gap between boys’ and girls’ reading skills has widened a bit more,” Whitmire writes. Boys aren’t wired for early verbal skills — and teachers aren’t trained in “boy-friendly” techniques to help them catch up.
Boys are asked to do too much too soon — and labeled hyperactive or bipolar or autistic if they act like little boys, writes psychologist Anthony Rao in The Way of Boys. “Girls use more words; they cooperate with others; they use social skills effectively. A boy’s brain by contrast, is working on other tasks that are equally important but not always valued as highly in schools, such as learning through touching and exploration, developing motor skills and engaging in spatial tasks. Boys also engage in normal aggression, and they have a healthy interest in challenging rules to test the limits of their power.”
Most boys will catch up in a few years. But some never do. While girls are doing better in all academic areas, boys are not. They earn lower grades, acquire “learning disability” labels, get in trouble and drop out. Boys who finish high school are less likely than girls to go on to college and those who do are less likely to earn a degree.
As a result, colleges are practicing affirmative action to keep enrollments from tilting so far female that girls don’t want to enroll either. A New York Times story profiles the University of North Carolina, 60 percent female, where coeds lament the shortage of males.
Overall, 57 percent of college students are women, reports the American Council on Education.
Other countries are seeing similar gender gaps. Women 25 to 34 years old are better educated than men in 20 of 30 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries with especially wide gender gaps in Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Men have more schooling only in Switzerland and Turkey.
In the U.S., the problems of boys are seen as a racial issue. Congress has mandated a $2 million study on minority male achievement. Certainly, black and Hispanic males are performing very poorly in school, falling way behind their sisters. Black females are twice as likely as males to go to college.
But some white boys are struggling too. “At the end of high school, nearly one in four white sons of college-educated parents scored ‘below basic’ on the reading section of the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), compared to 7 percent of their female counterparts,” Whitmire writes. That means they can’t read a newspaper with understanding — or a technical manual.
Problems start in preschool, where boys are far more likely to be kicked out for boyish behavior, writes Rao. “Boys are more likely to have trouble focusing and staying on task; boys have higher energy and tend to need to fidget to work off steam, which teachers and classmates can find distracting.” Most boys will grow out of hyperactivity, if given time, he argues. What they often get is a label and a prescription for Ritalin.
“Boy-friendly” classrooms let students move, explore, and touch — and let boys take their time to develop verbal and fine-motor skills. Teachers tolerate boys’ desire to fidget, daydream, challenge rules and fantasize about aliens, monsters, heroes and “robots fighting evil characters.” Children read adventure books, sports and nonfiction.
Yet when Whitmire went in search of gap-closing schools, he found that boy-friendly schools don’t teach boys differently than they teach girls.
KIPP’s middle school in Houston “succeeds with boys using methods that shred every bit of conventional wisdom about what works with boys.” Students are nearly all black; teachers are nearly all white and female. Class sizes are no smaller than normal. Furthermore, “the theories about boys — they need to walk around a lot, experience hands-on learning, etc. — are not in evidence at KIPP, which enforces some of the toughest sit-at-your-desk turn-in-your-homework policies you’ll see anywhere short of military academies.”
What KIPP provides is lots of extra help to get stragglers caught up.
“When you refuse to let even a single student slide by, you end up helping boys the most because the boys are the big sliders,” he writes.
Whitmire also looks at an all-male charter school and a district-run public school that have closed gender gaps. Both work very hard to teach reading to students who need extra help. To coin a phrase, they leave no child behind. The all-male school also provides character training to boys who may be growing up in fatherless homes, but there’s no reason boys can’t learn that in a coed setting, Whitmire theorizes.
Accused of shortchanging girls in a 1992 report by the American Association of University Women, schools pushed girls to study math and science. That gender gap has closed by some measures. It’s time to focus on the widening gap in reading and writing skills that leaves so many boys unprepared for success in college or vocational training. Perhaps boys will succeed with early intervention for reading problems. Perhaps some boys need male teachers, boy-friendly teaching, or an extra year to get ready for reading and writing. We should be experimenting with different strategies — including single-sex classes — to find out what’s needed to help boys succeed.
If nothing else, our educated daughters are going to want to marry educated men — not a “failure to launch” guy sleeping in his parents’ basement.
So momma gave them the word....Put him back where he was. Someday he'll mature and will soar to unbelievable heights.
AND HE DID!!
Proof ... “Girls mature faster than Boys” ... Whooda thunk it! :)
I think all-girls and all-boys classes in elementary school would be great. Boys and girls do learn differently, especially at young ages.
They got rid of industrial and vocational education and pushed the middle school model and this is what happened.
Girls are generally ahead of boys in language skills. This doesn’t prove that radical feminism is behind the gap.
However, if girls were behind boys, the radical feminists would be blaming it on patriarchal sexism, or some other such nonsense.
Homeschooling addresses this problem very well.
Hey they’re your sons, make sure they grow up like men and are educated properly. I sure ain’t leaving the child rearing of my kids to some public school system.
“Girls are generally ahead of boys”
And let’s keep it like that. It’s a great view.
Wait, are you telling me it’s possible that intelligence, and language development might somehow have a basis in genetics? Isn’t it sexist or racist to even consider that? Imagine the implications if someone inherited a predisposition, or lack thereof, to higher thought from their parents? Oh, dear.
Does better educated predict success or happiness? Gates and Rush both dropped college, and seem both successful and happy.
Or... boys could be different than girls (gasp) and might learn differently were different techniques offered (gasp).
It seems like the logical conclusion of this article is that boys and girls should not e in the same classes for a couple of years.
Boy can I attest to boys needing to fidget and expend normal aggression and all that fun stuff! You can give them one or 6 pencils and charge them for dropping it, and they will rarely keep one in their hand! As a homeschooling dad of 3 boys 5-7-9, they are a wonderful handful of slide and buck and run in three directions when they see dad distracted. And boy do they love going on hikes daily - in the streams and onto the boulders they go - and they carry their own dry clothes. I feel bad for these other kids - but my boys will lead the charge to fix the next generation if it likely takes that long. Atop my daily schedule is a tag line from a Freeper years ago - ADD = Adult Discipline Disorder. Parents can’t do it from home as they don’t see what a terror Johnny can be outside the home and teachers can’t do it without ALL parents’ backing them up fully.
In kindegarten, the teacher was labeling my son as slow because he wasn’t reading. They wanted to put him in a reading program and thought he might have problems.
He really didn’t read much until the summer before 2nd grade, and then he just read. We had an old e-book, and he read the Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit.
In 2nd grade at the same school (actually a private Christian school), the teacher accused him of cheating on his spelling tests because he always got 100% on the tests. and he never paid attention. I was furious because I knew he wasn’t cheating. I always gave him practice tests until he could spell the words.
We pulled him out of that school, and we did have him tested in the public school. He was gifted, and he was just bored in 2nd grade. He’s in a private high school now with high grades, and he always scores well on standardized testing.
I also have a special needs daughter. What’s funny, is the schools have always ignored her problems, and thought I was exaggerating problems with her. For example, the school thought she was choosing not to talk, and then an MRI showed she had terrible brain damage. Thought strange behavior problems were due to something I was doing until she had a grand mal seizure and was diagnosed with epilepsy.
When I was looking for a college for my daughter, I was amazed at how many more girls are enrolled in college vs. boys. This is sad.
It’s not just public schools. Private schools also have issues with boys.
This is just the start. When they get to be Men, these boys will be treated to a media that ridicules them at every turn, unless they choose to be homosexuals. They will date and marry Women who were raised in this environment, unless they were one of the few raised by Conservatives. They will be punished for simply being Men. Being a Man drives the left crazy, which is a reward in itself sometimes. Sometimes the only reward.
Not necessarily. Kids just in general learn differently.
I think kids should be tested early on to see if they are visual, audio, or kinesthetic learners, and then they should be placed into those types of classrooms.
I’m a visual and kinesthetic learner, like lots of boys. One of my daughters is also like me.
My son can handle audio learning better than me. He remembers things that he hears, and I don’t.
We are starting the college hunt with my son. He thinks it’s great. I don’t.
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